Are They Saviors? Medical Missionaries in the Development Sector

This paper sits at the intersection of development and Indian Christianity studies. It examines the development work of a medical missionary institution in South India. Scholars of Indian Christianity have examined how medical missionaries interacted and influenced spheres such as gender studies (Kent 2004), colonial structures of religion and medicine (Hardiman 2008), and local adaptations of medicine and Christianity (Bauman 2008). However, scholarship on medical missionaries has been confined to the colonial era,  with no work on how medical missionary institutions have adapted and continued their work, especially in relation to humanitarian aid. I place contemporary medical missionary development goals in conversation with Arjun Shankar’s recent work *Brown Saviors and Their Others* (2023). Shankar argues that the driving force behind development work in India are “brown saviors,” dominant caste Hindu technocrats with transnational mobility. These brown saviors reproduce racialized colonial era ideologies concerning who is in need, while simultaneously drawing on their ‘brownness’ as justification of their efforts and obscuring politics of caste capital and hierarchies of labor. 

In this paper I examine the Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore, South India. The CMC was founded by a Protestant medical missionary, Dr. Ida Scudder (1870-1960) as a women’s only college and teaching hospital in 1900. Since 1947, the college and hospital became co-educational, and is considered a premier institution in India today. Since its inception, humanitarian aid has gone hand in hand with its medical practice, with an emphasis on women’s empowerment. I focus on the work conducted in the department of the Rural Unit of Health and Social Affairs (RUHSA), an NGO offshoot of the CMC founded in 1977. RUHSA offers a range of health and social services, including profession-based self groups for women. I draw primarily on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at RUHSA in the summer of 2023, supplemented with archival records from “The Ida Scudder Papers,” an extensive archive dedicated to Ida Scudder and the CMC. I use one of the self-help groups on campus as a case study to explore how developmental ideals are translated into action, and how the women within the self-help group interact with those ideals. 

I argue that the racial capital accrued by foreign missionaries has found new expressions in both caste and religious positionality in the modern day medical missionary endeavors, such as seen through the efforts at RUHSA. There is a discernible historical paternalism linked to how aid is expressed to oppressed caste communities through the institution. Although there are similarities with Shankar’s brown saviors, particularly in labor hierarchies and development ideologies surrounding ideas of motivation, I ask if there is anything distinct about Indian Christian aid as opposed to the brown saviors found in Shankar’s work. His saviors are Hindu and dominant caste, one or neither of which apply in cases at the CMC and RUHSA where the staff, especially in the higher echelons, is uniformly Christian. Caste politics are not so clear cut in Indian Christian communities where caste is publicly disavowed and yet caste practices continue. Furthermore, the minority status of Indian Christians, with the majority belonging to historically oppressed caste communities muddies a straightforward connection between caste privilege and articulations of humanitarian aid. The distinct form of aid propounded through RUHSA contains echoes of colonial missionary endeavors and yet also comprises a unique intersection between Indian Christianity and neo-liberal development discourse.